The Doves that Strut

16

"Get the hell off him!" he shouted. Toward the small crowd of a dozen protestors charged a policeman in armor so heavy that his face and body shape was indiscernible from his kind, grasping the handle of his gun—once the weapon belonging to a divine guardian of peace everyone had held faith in, now a dividing line setting its depraved owner above every life he had sworn to protect.

In front of the convenience store, there's another cop, surrounded by the crowd. His limbs pinned down on the road by everyone, he swang the truncheon in his right hand, dementedly trying to break free. "I'ma fucking kill y'all! My guys are gonna have you tortured! You're all dead!"

"Get the hell off him!" the first cop repeated when he was intercepted by Frank Allington, a fifteen-year-old tenth-grader, a lovely kid, as they say.

"No!" Frank shrieked, using his own body to stop the villain from approaching the crowd. All he had was an A3-size wooden shield gripped in his left hand and a plastic bottle which he bashed the villain's helmet with in his right. Tickles. It was a desperate move by a mortal standing between the vicious dragon and his homeland, as in many tales.

"Get out of the way, rat!" the dragon bellowed with his deep, husky voice. If Frank'd paid just enough heed, he would have noticed him subtly adjusting the position of his gun, aiming.

But he didn't, or couldn't. He's too overwhelmed wrestling with the dragon who could easily overpower him, to concern the cunning of his enemy. He still hadn't come to sense that dragons were also capable of breathing flames until his enemy pulled the trigger, and... pop.

Frank loosened his grips and fell on his back while his shield and bottle landed next to him, almost soundless. As the bottle rolled away from him, more cops stepped into the field and subdued the crowd to rescue their accomplice.

"I got shot!" Frank screamed and moaned, unable to do anything besides glazing over at the lightless night sky, I suppose, while his clothes crimsoned. "It hurts!"

"Someone help! Someone cover his wound! Please!" begged one of his allies, pressed down on the sidewalk. He wiggled, looking to move toward Frank, even though he's being cuffed by the cop bearing whose knees down on his back, just below his neck. "Someone call 911!" He'd forgotten the irony, that they're the 911.

To quote Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." In this frame, the brightest side of humanity, perhaps our last hope, shone selfishness and empathy while the darkest leaped and engulfed every bit of the light it converged with.

"Hey, the fuck are you doing?" another cop asked before the lens, shouting with a voice similar to the shooter's and the truncheon swinger's. No one could recognize the face underneath his military gas mask. All there's to see was his eyes heated in rage.

"Uh, sir, I'm a cameraman," a male voice stammered. "I—I've got a license. It's in my pock—"

"Turn it off!" he bawled, deafening.

"But I've got a license, sir—"

"Leave right this instant! Or I'll arrest you and shove this camera up your ass!"

"Please! Listen to me!" The screen shook frantically and tipped upside down. The replay button appeared, but it wasn't the end of the story. No, we are far from it.

"I feel like Fragranceport's law enforcement has become a complete lost cause," Claire muttered, propping her phone on the white table with her left hand.

"How many times have you watched this?" I asked after finishing up the last bite of my sandwich.

"Twel—twenty times," she said, and shook her head, "or more." She cut a glance at my transparent lunch box next to her phone. "You should seriously stop having sandwiches for every meal."